But why? Is there not enough "fire and forget" early access alphas around? Also ED was in slow development for 6 year before Kickstarter. ED had actual goods to show during KS, with multiplayer combat which is now delivered to alpha testers - but not only that. In nutshell KS wasn't stellar success, but it wasn't failure you describe either, for community it worked beautifully. Also I see you are not in alpha - otherwise you would agree that wide alpha (as FD understands this name) is not nor practical, nor managable. I would like to point out that people already complain that FD cashes in on alpha, so there's clear contradiction here.
First, updates were a lot and very interesting. Space stations, traveling, ship design, sound design. cockpit....and so on and so forth. Everyone could watch Youtube videos and subscribe to newsletters by the way (even without becoming backer). Limited information? SC shows only ships at this point, and almost no footage of DFM. I wonder why.
Second, while DDF was place where majority of discussion happened, everyone interested enough could participate. Despite some arguing against DDF archive was created and lot of people outside DDF chimed in on lot of topics, and their input were valued quite a bit. For example, during in-system traveling discussion Mike Evans questioned lot of people outside DDF for reasons requiring now what we know as supercruise.
"Blind faith"? Social division? Do I really taste soar grapes here?
Also I will disagree with flooding people with information. There's such thing as over-saturation, and giving wrong first impression. People around net already talking that ED is just another space combat shooter.
And this is because ED is still in development, and no active sales are planned till Q4? Again, in my opinion, FD clearly plans to push for more PR efforts when normal beta closes in. Reasons for this are obvious - for example, at this point people see this is nice game, but ohh, alpha is costly, so no interest. Also to be honest, no way I would show alpha to common crowd at this point. It is just too buggy and messy and stuff gets fixed as we discuss here.
FD don't listen to feedback? In what kind of universe you live in? Of course they don't support any suggestion thrown around here, however they are very welcoming to constructive feedback, which has been resulted in much better game than any of us expected. Traveling? Check. Recent buzz with radar? They will look into it. Stuff floating around? also there will be slider. Seriously, what's wrong with you?
So far I have hard time to see how they will fail in long term. They have solid tech, solid backing from people from community, and they learn from their mistakes. And yeah, they are making their own game. I would say it has worked pretty well so far.
